Exhibitions

Before Columbus: Iconography in the Ancient Americas

February 9 - May 18, 2008

The ancient civilizations of the Americas represent distinct and unique artistic traditions, sharing an emphasis on art as a vehicle for communicating symbolic and cosmological meanings. Featuring ceramics, textiles, featherwork, and objects of stone, metal and shell, Before Columbus: Iconography in the Ancient Americas highlights both the range of iconographic forms found throughout the pre-Columbian New World, and the complexity of interpreting their meanings in a post-Columbian setting. The exhibition includes works ranging from the Peruvian highlands and Amazon Basin through Mesoamerica to ancient Missouri.

excerpts from Alex Barker's Museum Magazine article:

Drawn mainly from objects in the Museum’s permanent collections - some never before exhibited - the exhibition focuses on textiles, pottery and metalwork, the areas of greatest emphasis and achievement in the surviving art and artifacts of pre-Columbian societies. Ranging from Mayan polychrome glyphic vases to ancient featherwork of South America, from ancient Andean textiles to fragments of friezes from the great Mexican city of Teotihuacan, and featuring gold from the isthmus of Panama to the effigy vessels of Colima and Moche, Before Columbus: Iconography in the Ancient Americas showcases the breadth of artistic achievements of the ancient Americas, and provides insights into the iconographic meanings of the works’ rich symbolism.

Iconography - or the interpretation of the content of representational art, identifying the narratives depicted and giving meaning and movement to static images - represents a key aspect of understanding and appreciating artistic expression. For much of the art of the ancient Americas those narratives are lost or fragmentary, and scholars have focused not only on what representational art means but also how it means, on how the meanings of pre-Columbian art can be reconstructed by systematically studying how meaning is communicated, constructed and construed. . . .

Complex pre-Columbian societies were not limited to Central and South America. Complex societies arose right here in the midcontinent as well; Monk’s Mound, just outside modern-day St. Louis at the Cahokia site, is a Mississippian-period mound that’s a thousand feet long, a hundred feet high, and larger in basal area than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Some scholars believe that at its maximum extent a millennium ago Cahokia was larger than London. One of the remarkable artworks included in Before Columbus: Iconography in the Ancient Americas is the so-called Fairfield Gorget, an engraved marine shell ornament carved on a whelk from the Gulf Coast, depicting a Central American ocelot and found in a Woodland period mound from ancient Missouri. . . .

Before Columbus: Iconography in the Ancient Americas will allow visitors to enjoy the remarkable artistic traditions of the pre-Columbian New World. It also allows visitors to project their imaginations into that pre-Columbian past, and perhaps will allow that past to capture the imagination of newcomers, confounding their expectations and expanding their views of our own adopted land.

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(pdf - 1.7MB)

Polychrome Tripod Plate with Moan Bird
Mexico, Coastal Campeche
ca. 600-900 CE
Pottery
(76.82)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Cedric H. Marks,
in memory of Julius Carlebach

Gorget
Fairfield Mound 2, Benton County, Missouri
Probably dating to the Middle Woodland period
Recovered by Dr. W. Raymond Wood in 1958
Incised conch shell
on loan from the MU Museum of Anthropology
(MAC 2002-03-001)

Focus Exhibition: Dreams of the Surreal

March 11 - July 13, 2008

Surrealism was an international artistic and literary movement that was founded in Paris in 1924. Evolving out of Dada, the new movement embraced the same revolutionary politics, distaste for cultural conventions and use of chance in the creation of art. Surrealism sought to fuse reality and the unconscious to arrive at a "super-reality," or "surréalisme."

Artistic creativity was freed from the constraints of reason, morals and aesthetic concerns. In exploring this, the Surrealists were deeply influenced by the ideas of Freud and his study of the power of the subconscious and the importance of dreams in exploring the innermost realms of the mind.

The nine works selected for this focus exhibition come from the collections of the Museum of Art and Archaeology. Each work of art subverts the normal in a unique way. They evidence a wide variety of approaches toward the representation of dreams and unconscious thoughts.

Daumier’s Paris: Life in the Nineteenth-Century City

June 30, 2007 - May 25, 2008

Opening June 30, 2007

Born in Marseille in 1808, Honoré Daumier became one of France’s most well known printmakers and caricaturists, though he was also a painter and sculptor. Daumier is particularly known for his prolific work as a lithographer, which often caricatured the bourgeois society of Paris. In this exhibition, featured in three installments, Daumier’s unique view of nineteenth-century Paris is illustrated through a selection of the artist’s lithographs.

Ancient Glass from the Permanent Collection

ongoing from August 2007

This exhibition highlights the Museum’s finest ancient glass vessels, representing various techniques of manufacture including core-formed, free-blown and mold-made examples. A broad spectrum of time periods are also encompassed, ranging from Greek to Roman and from Byzantine to Islamic. The ancient glass collection is indebted to Gladys Davidson Weinberg, who was co-founder of the Museum, and held the titles of curator and honorary research fellow. Weinberg was a pioneer in the field of ancient glass and did much to advance the study of this fascinating aspect of ancient material culture. Moreover, she acquired many glass objects for the Museum’s antiquities collection, some of which are included in this exhibit.

South Asian Sculpture

ongoing from April 2006

This new installation features selections of Buddhist and Hindu sculpture from the Museum’s permanent collection. Stone reliefs from ancient Gandhara show early Buddhist imagery, dating to the first several centuries of the Common Era. From medieval and later India are two- and three-dimensional sculptures in bronze and stone that depict many of the most important deities of the Hindu pantheon.